Web Video / SoundSmith

I'm a composer and sound designer, hence the name, SoundSmith. But I'm mostly known for Team Fortress 2 and being an idiot. So, that's cool I guess

The channel trailer description.

SoundSmith (real first name Ethan) is a YouTube content creator, most well-known for videos based on Team Fortress 2. His most popular video sagas include TF2 Stereotypes (to his chagrin) discussing stereotypes associated with specific hats, weapons and miscs in TF2, Mann's Guide videos that demonstrate "pro" gameplay gimmicks with various TF2 weapons, the How to Trolldier educational series, MVM Shenanigans that shows his exploits in the Mann vs. Machine gamemode, and various gimmicky videos of him goofing off with his friends. As of late he's been pushing more into variety content as well, most notably with Sandbox Shenanigans in Garry's Mod.

Oh, and he also does music. That's where the name comes from.

Trope Stereotypes: Episode 1: SoundSmith

• Adam Westing: The Mann's Guide to the Huntsman has a joke about Lazy Purple's "How it FEELS to Play Medic in TF2" video invokedtaking a long while to release (over three years between Lazy's previous "How it FEELS to Play" video and the Mann's Guide video). Not coincidentally, LazyPurple voices himself making a reference to a SpongeBob episode where SpongeBob struggles with procrastination in making some important project. Oh, and to top it all off, the joke was entirely Lazy's idea.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: In Monthly Meatloaf: The Edgy Banana, Sound calls himself a "sucker for alliteration", as to why the series was named "Monthly Meatloaf".
• Alternate Reality Game: Following the "Clubsy Conspiracy" bit of his Engineer Misc Stereotypes video, the following episodes began hinting at a bigger conspiracy that all "cute animal" cosmetics were in on that involved brainwashing SoundSmith to influence TF2's economy so that they became more popular and expensive than "cool" cosmetics. After a dramatic, disturbing ending to the Sniper Misc Stereotypes episode, fans to were able follow a cryptic track of clues to discover the heart of the conspiracy's organization. Come the Spy Misc Stereotypes series finale, a man who goes by "War Pig" infiltrates the Pets' base, breaks SoundSmith out of there, and tells him to tell everyone that war is coming, and they need to pick a side.
• Anti-Humor: In this promotion for the video sponsor, one of the reasons why Soundsmith vouches for Opera GX is because other browsers tend to explode his computer when he tries to open them while playing graphically intensive games. Opera GX's process limiter prevents this, so Soundsmith "[doesn't] have to worry about [his] computer exploding in a comically large fireball." His computer doesn't explode into a comically large fireball, so the scene just depicts him standing next to his computer for an extended moment while nothing happens.
• Art Imitates Art: The various thumbnails of the Mann's Guide videos are based on existing paintings.
  • The Force-a-Nature video is based on the Creation of Adam, with a Gibus Scout replacing Adam and a Lime Scunt replacing God, giving the Gibus a Force-a-Nature instead of pointing to him.
  • The Beggar's Bazooka is based on the Birth of Venus, for the Soldier's holding up the bazooka in the same way Venus covers her own body, and the surrounding Soldiers (two on the left, one on the right) looking on in awe.
  • The Big Earner's thumbnail imitates Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp", with one Spy on the right pointing a knife towards a cadaver, while an enraptured audience congregates on the left.
  • The Backburner's image is a pastiche of Italian painter Tinteretto's "Lamentation of Christ". Medic is being held up by a group in the same way Jesus was in that painting, with the addition of a Backburner Pyro causing the whole group further agony.
  • The Huntsman's thumbnail was based on Anton Raphael Mengs' "Diana The Huntress" with a Hunstman Sniper copying the eponymous goddess' pose, with the behind the scenes video reusing a scrapped idea drawing from one of William Russel Flint's illustrations for Le Morte D Arthur, with three Snipers replacing three of the four hunters. The scene has been expanded to show the Snipers are taking aim at a Pyro cutout.
• Author Catchphrase:
  • "We take those!" - after a kill he thinks he didn't deserve.
  • "I respect that." - after the enemy player does something stupid yet worth admiring just for the sheer ballsiness of it.
  • "This is cursed!" - whenever something exceptionally weird or stupid happens.
  • "What a gamer."
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The overall theme of A Mann's Guide to the Backburner, from pre-release media implying the video was actually going to be about the Huntsman to Ethan's main piece of advice about the weapon being to get the enemy to expect one thing before doing something else. Two weeks later, however, this also turned out to be a bait-and-switch when A Mann's Guide to the Huntsman was released for real. Though Ethan himself admits that the work required for it means this sort of stunt is unlikely to be repeated.
  • In a tip for the Huntsman, Soundsmith suggests to blind-fire corners if the user knows an enemy will be there. As an example, he cites the sniper spot on Doublecross, then shows footage of his Sniper navigating to an angle to fire there... and rather than blind-firing a Sniper as he suggested, Soundsmith instead shoots a random arrow and nails an invisible Spy.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Deliberately invoked by War Paint Stereotypes: Sound saw people clamouring for a new Stereotypes video despite his hatred of the series, and decided to call them out by technically giving them what they wanted, warts and all. He even lampshades it in the description.
  This video was bought to you by The Monkey's Paw™! Shoutout to everyone who once though, "I sure wish Soundsmith would go back to making stereotype videos like he used to!" This is what you wanted, right?
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: He's primarily focused on doing stupid gimmicks and tactics for the hell of it, but considering he mostly plays on Capture the Flag servers - the casualest Team Fortress 2 can be - it can end up being surprisingly effective, and he's genuinely quite good at the game once he starts playing seriously.
• Burger Fool: Invoked with Tower Unite is Ridiculous:
  [In response to Soundsmith saying he saw animatronics at Sisi's Pizza]: "Those aren't animatronics, those are cashiers, Ethan."
  "No no no no, they gotta be animatronics, dude, they looked so dead inside, it was crazy."
• …But He Sounds Handsome: Played for laughs when describing both his hat of choice and the Market Gardener in the respective Stereotypes episodes.
• Call-Back:
  • During A Mann's Guide to the Big Earner, one clip has a Beggar's Bazooka Soldier floating between two portals, a reference to a gag in that weapon's Mann's Guide.
  • While going over the speed buff that the weapon gives to Spy after he backstabs an enemy. Ethan brings up the "zoom like Tim Allen" joke that had previously been a bizarre Non Sequitur during the Spy Weapons Stereotype videos.
  • The "Roll a Deception check" gag from A Mann's Guide To The Big Earner returns in A Mann's Guide To The Backburner.
• Chekhov's Gun: The flash grenades in Himbo Man, which starts as the friends questioning why the bank guards would have them.invoked Ethan uses them to get past the final group of guards between him and the escape point.
• Censored for Comedy: In one of his Human: Fall Flat videos, he gets asked "what's your fetish?" as a part of a gag. The answer got bleeped out, and then his friends suggest replacing the answer with a long bleep for that exact reason. By SoundSmith's admission, his response was "the most vanilla shit ever", but bleeping it out made it sound much more depraved.
• Crazy Enough to Work: The point of the "Casual Meta" series.
• Cyanide Pill: He's incredibly fond of using a killbind (a button bound to console command "kill" or "explode" in TF2) whenever something mildly amusing happens, or just for a quick laugh.
• Death from Above: Very fond of playing as a Trolldier (a Soldier who rocket jumps into the air before killing people on landing with the Market Gardener). He also pulled off a similar trick in Valheim.
• Didn't We Use This Joke Already?: Twice, for two different jokes, in Soldier Misc Stereotypes.
• Dissimile: In "A Mann's Guide to the Big Earner" when describing all the various types of trickstabs, Ethan describes understabs as "like underwear, but with a knife". He also clearly gets confused at the script while saying it (since KJ wrote that comparison in) and the camera quickly cuts to him staring at it perplexedly for a second after he says it.
• Failed a Spot Check: In the "Sentry Placement" Casual Meta, Ethan and KJ are experimenting with unusual places to stick sentries. At one point, KJ is looking for a place to set his sentry down, completely oblivious to all the players right beneath him, all the while Ethan repeatedly warns him that he's about to be blown up. After he predictably gets blown up, KJ still insists they "just appeared out of nowhere."
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: During Recreating an Average Episode Of Johnny Test, Gunk changes his screen name to "Nae Nae sfx" to Ethan's amusement. Paying attention to the chat in the previous clip lets you see the exact moment Gunk makes the change.
• Fix Fic: In the Mann's Guide to the Huntsman, Soundsmith takes issue to the Huntsman not having a list of stats in the weapon screen. He has to fix it by adding his own stats based on how the weapon works in-game.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • "10 Tips To Improve Your Audio For TF2 Content", as the title suggests, is less about the game itself and more about audio recording, editing, and processing.
  • The Mann's Guide series normally starts out as serious advice for how to use a given weapon, then follows Soundsmith and Clockwerk Smurf's descent into insanity and incoherence. In an inversion of this, the Mann's Guide to the Huntsman starts crazy, with nonsense gags like the recording studio getting possessed by a Huntsman poltergeist, then sobers up by the end, with a remark that nobody takes the weapon seriously in spite of the unique gameplay and skill it provides.
• Hard Work Fallacy: This underlines his opinion on game balancing, a perspective perhaps rooted in his less-showcased enthusiasm for certain "children's fighting games": Success in killing enemies and winning the match should depend on the effort and skill you put into your gameplay, "earning" your success. This leads him to have some strong opinions on some of 'Team Fortress 2's mechanics:
  • He's openly opposed to random crits and wishes Valve would remove them entirely, and outside of most melee fights he'll kill himself and apologize if he ends up killing someone with a random-crit kill. And even with melee..
    [Sarcastic]Hey Soldier, that's a nice earned crit you got there. I got something better! [Random-crit kills a Soldier while "ISNT RNG GREAT?!?" flashes on screen]
  • Prior to Jungle Inferno, the infamous effectiveness of the "Reserve Shooter" on Pyro (being able to crit-attack players made airborne by an airblast) and the ease of abusing the Dead Ringer to evade being killed on Spy felt so unbalanced to him that he refused to use the weapons on actual players. Even after the nerfs, Soundsmith admits he still feels a little dirty using the latter.
  • Between TF2's Jungle Inferno update in October 2017 and the Blue Moon Update of March 2018, he felt terrible playing Pyro due to base flamethrower damage across all flamethrowers being strong enough to heavily wreck multiple enemies just by charging forward and flailing the mouse around.
• High-Altitude Battle: Soundsmith's preferred playstyle is this, jumping high with loadouts on Soldier and Demoman to soar through the battlefield and nail unsuspecting players.
• Hitbox Dissonance: Part of his advice for the Huntsman is to get good mileage out of how janky the hitbox works. Arrows don't need to hit the head to count as a headshot: if they hit the larger player collision box and the nearest part of the victim's body is the head, that'll count as a headshot. As such, many freezeframes in the video show Soundsmith very visibly shooting the empty space next to an opponent's head, yet that somehow counts as a headshot.
• Insistent Terminology: He tends to call any shovel he finds a Market Gardener, and any sort of melee Death from Above "market gardening", even if he isn't playing TF2.
• Lethal Chef: "DYNAMITE SPAGHETTI" has Soundsmith and friends imagining a invokedSpin-Off Cookbook detailing their various misadventures in food, Real Life or not. Of the three suggested recipes in it, a chocolate chip cookie recipe with black beans substituting the chocolate is the least harmful dish. The other two recipes are "good spaghetti with a cartoon dynamite stuck in it" and "burnt hot pocket with glass shards in it".
• Made of Explodium: In Every Early 2000s Discovery Channel Show, The Stinger features Bob Fart visiting a military surplus store and learning that they're selling a bomb. As if on cue, the bomb explodes right after Bob exclaims that it's a bomb. An outtake just before the video ends has that same bomb exploding in reaction to a glass bottle rolling off the shelf that it's resting on.
• Manipulative Editing: Parodied with Wolf's callout video in The Scoundrels Return, where Wolf claims Ethan confessed to manipulating upgrade prices. Said confession is a Discord message where Ethan's response has "Yes" covering it and the rest crossed out with two thin lines, leaving the original message extremely clear.
• Meta Fiction: Part of the storytelling with later Mann's Guide videos follows producers Soundsmith and KJ getting into antics within the studio as they struggle to produce the guide videos themselves.
• Metaphorgotten: The stereotype for Ze Ubermensch:
  He stared into the abyss and the abyss stared back. [Beat] The abyss was a sniper sightline. He's gone, he game-ended.
• Negative Continuity: The events of A Mann's Guide to the Big Earner follow Ethan and KJ fighting a MegaCorp as they attempt to balance profitability against doing the kind of show they want to run. The following A Mann's Guide to the Backburner goes back to the same recording studio again, with nothing of the previous episode's events referenced except in a throwaway line that states that everything resets before every episode.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Ethan exploits this with the previews of the fourth Mann's Guide video due to the theme of the video being "unexpected"; he first said it was about the Huntsman, even going as far as to show a fake preview clip of him using the Huntsman and showing off the intro with the Sniper with a Huntsman. Not only does the clip not appear in the video, it turns out that the actual weapon the episode was focused on was the Backburner. Except this was then subverted when, two weeks after A Mann's Guide to the Backburner, Ethan released the actual A Mann's Guide to the Huntsman video he initially promised, preview clip and all.
• Overshadowed by Awesome:
  • Zig-zagged with "A Mann's Guide to the Huntsman":
    • A sizeable chunk of the video is dedicated to highlighting how busted the stock Sniper Rifle is in comparison to the Huntsman at long range and against light classes, since the Huntsman's assumed niche (dealing long-range damage while moving even at short range) is something the Sniper Rifle can still do via quickscope technique. Soundsmith has to resort to highlighting superficial things like tauntkills or that the Huntsman produces a funny ragdoll in order to find a reason to use it over the rifle.
    • This is soon subverted, however, much to Soundsmith's own surprise - it turns out that the sniper rifle simply can't quick-scope the likes of Soldiers, Demomen, Pyros and Heavies and thus the Sniper becomes easy pickings for them at short-to-medium range (all of whom can either close the distance quickly or mow the Sniper down before he can properly charge a shot), and the sniper rifle has a delay before it begins to charge and takes three whole seconds to fully charge, whereas the Huntsman starts charging instantly and only takes a second to charge, enabling a Sniper to reach 175-200 damage in a single headshot with very little charge time and can take out any non-overhealed Heavy (and any other overhealed class in the game) with one fully-charged headshot very quickly (as demonstrated by the Huntsman easily killing Demomen and a Heavy before they can take the Sniper out, whereas the the sniper rifle's quick-scope is ineffectual and the Sniper has absolutely no time to fully charge before they get mowed down). Soundsmith also quickly discovers that the Huntsman has movement techniques along with its ability to move significantly faster while charging means the Sniper can be significantly more mobile. The ultimate conclusion is that while it can be effective at long range, the Huntsman best excels at short-to-medium range where the regular sniper rifle struggles if caught without a charge, and the Sniper can viably fight tankier classes even in their ideal range, whereas being caught out with a sniper rifle at short-to-medium range by any class the sniper rifle can't quick-scope becomes a likely death sentence. Soundsmith laments at the end that the Huntsman is a legitimately good weapon with an actual skill ceiling in a valid niche where the sniper rifle can't compete, but has been pigeon-holed as a joke weapon due to its quirks and how it is overshadowed by the sniper rifles.
• Rage Quit: Uncommon with his chill attitude (he's more likely to laugh at other players taking this route ingame), but sometimes employed for comedic effectiveness.
  • Spy Weapon Stereotypes ends with him angrily storming away from the room, angry about invokedthe Dead Ringer.
  • Engineer Misc Stereotypes ends this way after Soundsmith is fed up by the final lineup of miscs on his script all being extremely-similar shirt cosmetics.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: One of Soundsmith's friends and regular collaborators, OrnaBug, uses an orange Lurantis playermodel wearing TF2's "Company Man" ballcap while taking part in Sandbox Shenanigans video, giving him a very cute-looking appearance admist all the stupid/weird shit the gang does in Garry's Mod.
• Running Gag:
  • Anything that could be described as "edgy" used to get a short snippet of Linkin Park's Crawling in early Stereotype videos. He's intentionally ended the joke, though that hasn't stopped the joke from trying to return.
  • Medic Misc Stereotypes makes a few jokes about Medics being promptly shot by Snipers.
  • Mann's Guide for the Big Earner features Soundsmith and Co. Constantly running out of money for the Show's production.
• Schmuck Bait: One Trashmann video has him use a cancellable taunt after "killing" a Dead Ringer Spy. He takes the bait and dies for real as a result.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After going on a very long-winded rant about the Dead Ringer to cap off Spy Weapon Stereotypes, he just walks off the set and doesn't even come back for the video closing.
• Shamu Fu: He's fond of Scout's Holy Mackerel. One of his videos is titled "Fish" and consists of him and his friends slapping people with it for 14 minutes.
• Shout-Out: Lots of them.
  • Too many JoJo's Bizarre Adventure references to count, bordering on Author Appeal.
  • When demonstrating Beggar's Bazooka's simplicity and effectiveness in Mann's Guide 2, he uses Ed's laugh in tandem with the show's soundtrack.
  • Soldier Misc Stereotypes: The stereotype of the Compatriot is, in its entirety, an earrape version of the American Dad! intro.
  • Medic Misc Stereotypes has a Burly Beast-wearing Medic trying to tank a rocket and failing miserably. A text flashes on screen:
    (note: that only works when you're playing engineer and have a purple beard)
  • Engineer Misc Stereotypes has a skit where Soundsmith plays a conspiracy theorist obviously inspired by Alex Jones.
  • Bordering on Take That!, he did two episodes on the Disciplinary Action, and the titles of both referred to Johnny Test.
  • All three Trashmann videos begin with a bit featuring The Trashman from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
  • Casual Meta: Garbage Day has the whole premise be one to Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2.
  • When talking about Cyberpunk 2077's acceleration bug, he describes it as flying before changing his tune, saying "To be fair, it's not flying. Jump good".
  • Tons in the Human: Fall Flat videos, mostly regarding the skins used by the group, including The Purple Guy, Handsome Squidward, and The Nostalgia Critic^note For added reference, when the NC skin is revealed, Doug's screaming and the beginning of The Review Must Go On is played before the clip ends
  • Soundsmith borrows JoCat's "SMITE!" voice line when hitting people with the Frying Pan in the Backburner guide.
  • A couple in "A Mann's Guide to the Huntsman":
    • Lazy Purple is shown furiously working on a typewriter, only to produce a very underwhelming opening sentence of his script, which opens with a very fancy caligraphy of the word "That". This is a reference to the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Procrastination", in which Spongebob fervently works on his boating school essay but only makes a very fancy "The".
    • When talking about the Huntsman's infamous reputation, Ethan pushes his head through the gameplay in a similar manner to HBomberguy's "FUCKING AQUAMAN?!" clip, down to using the same static transition to the next clip. The reference would be expanded on when Ethan discusses the clip in the "Behind The Scenes" video where Ethan makes multiple references to "not wanting to be in the second half of an HBomberguy video" and being extremely careful to cite his sources, a nod to Harry's latest^note as of the release of "Huntsman Behind The Scenes" video calling out several high profile YouTube content creators for plagiarism.
• Shovel Strike: As a general rule, if a game features a shovel as a weapon, he will make use of it. In Team Fortress 2, the Market Gardener is his weapon of choice, and he has made several videos about using it more effectively.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Tends to happen whenever Soundsmith's friends/fellow TF2tubers are part of the video, especially with Bearded Expense.
• Status Quo Is God: The "A Mann's Guide to" series is procedural, with the "the Backburner" episode specifically highlighting it since Ethan was wondering why they were back in the studio after the events of "the Big Earner" (specifically the pair having earned the ire of their corporate overlords and were on the run as a result), causing KJ to explain as much to him. "The Huntsman" episode happens because Chris of The ChristoLee Show (which is notably not procedural) was trying to mess around with the Procedural Episode Machine in an attempt to reverse his show back to the start of season 1, but he screws up and instead generates the Huntsman episode.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • In The Scoundrels Return, Wolf makes a fake YouTube video accusing Ethan of manipulating the in-game upgrade costs with this quality.
  • invokedThe first and only episode of "War Paint Stereotypes" is a throwback to the very first Stereotypes videos before Ethan started putting more work into them, complete with messy, unclean transitions, bad unisolated audio and even the old "crawling in my skin" earrape gag which Ethan despises and finds deeply unfunny.
  • When In-Universe Executive Meddling in A Mann's Guide to the Big Earner causes the show to be hit with budget cuts, the SFM animation is replaced with deliberately poorly done GMod animation until they can get a sponsor. It happens again in the Backburner episode as a Take That! to the low-effort podcasts the duo are parodying.
• Take That!: The end of A Mann's Guide to the Backburner is nothing short of vicious mockery towards low-effort "manosphere" podcasts, complete with an insecure host who talks over the guest, the guest only being there to agree with everything the host says, and the host complaining about being "censored" and calling people he doesn't like "woke", and then using it as a springboard to promote his other shows/products.
• Taking the Bullet: Parodied in Soldier Misc Stereotypes with two "GET DOWN MR. PRESIDENT" skits based on the "Federal Express" cosmetic set. A brave Soldier wearing the set takes a Sniper's bullet for his Medic Commander in Chief, but is a lot less enthusiastic doing the same for a Heavy in a bad yellow toupee...
• Viewers Are Goldfish: Played for Laughs in A Mann's Guide to the Backburner, in which Soundsmith takes less than five seconds to mention the sponsor of the video Marketplace.tf also handles Dota 2 and Steam inventory items — which the audience might not be interested in. He has to wrestle viewers' attention back by jingling keys in front of the screen as if he's trying to placate a baby.
• Where's the Kaboom?: In Every Early 2000s Discovery Channel Show, Alan picks up one of the unclaimed packages he's selling as mystery boxes in Alan's Antiques. He casually remarks that "it could be a bomb" three times in a row, dramatically throwing it against the floor each time. The mystery package doesn't explode.
• Your Costume Needs Work: I'm Fake (PSA) focuses on people accusing Ethan of being a fake SoundSmith.